Book Review: Alone in the Universe by John Gribbin

It may well be that we are "It", which makes it all the more important that we take better care of ourselves and the Earth...

In my recent column How It Was: You used to be able to see the stars at night, I told how – on the way back from our Boy Scouts meetings when we were about 10 years old (circa 1967) – my best friend, Jeremy Goodman, and I would each buy a bag of chips (French Fries) from the Fish-and-Chip shop at the bottom of his road. (FYI I think a bag of chips used to cost us a sixpenny piece – and these were “old pennies” before the country went to a decimal currency in 1971.)

Our favorite time of the year was the fall when there was a chill in the air. Jeremy and I would take our bags of chips, walk up the road to his house, and – using various finger- and toe-holds and well placed vines – climb onto the flat roof of his garage. Then we would laze on our backs munching on our chips while we looked at the stars and talked about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The point is that we knew that there are billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy (the estimate keeps increasing, but let’s assume that there are several hundred billion stars). We also knew that there are billions of galaxies in the universe (again, the estimate keeps on going up, but it’s now known that there are hundreds of billions, and perhaps trillions, of galaxies in the observable universe).

We also fully believed in the possibility of alien life in general and – more specifically – intelligent alien life. In fact, I actually remember our wondering if there were the alien equivalents of Boy Scouts and – if so – if two of them were lying on their backs (or whatever), eating their chips (or whatever), pointing their tentacles (or whatever) in our general direction, and asking much the same questions; that is, we conceived them as wondering if alien life – which would be us as far as they were concerned – existed and so on and so forth.

As I’ve grown older and been exposed to much more detailed information than existed in those days, I’ve come to understand that life is almost certainly rampant throughout the universe. We know that the basic building blocks of life, in the form of relatively complex molecules and amino acids and suchlike, have been found in meteorites and detected in gas clouds in space. And books like Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell by Dennis Bray (Click Here to see my review) explain how the first cells could have formed on Earth, how the eye could have evolved, and… more mind-bogglingly wonderful things than I can possibly discuss here (I would class this book as one of the “all-time great reads”).

Thus, until recently, based on the fact that there are so many galaxies and stars, and that life seems to be poised to breakout given even the slightest encouragement, if you had asked me about the possibility of intelligent life in general – and intelligent life leading to a technological civilization with which we could possibly establish communication (assuming we were close enough spatially and temporally) – I would have said that I was a total believer.

And then I read Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet is Unique by John Gribbin. I have to tell you that this is a “bit of a downer”, because Gribbin makes a very compelling case for the fact that we may well be alone (as an intelligent technological race) in the universe.

The blurb on the back cover summarizes this book nicely and reads as follows:

Are there other planets in the galaxy that can sustain life? Almost certainly so. Are any of them likely to be populated by intelligent beings? According to John Gribbin, one of today’s most popular science writers, definitely not. In this fascinating and intriguing new book, Gribbin argues that the very existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos is, from an astrophysicist’s point of view, almost a miracle. So why is there intelligent life on Earth and (seemingly) nowhere else? What happened to make this planet special? Taking us back billions of years to a time before Earth even existed; Gribben lets you experience the series of extraordinary cosmic events that were responsible for our unique form of life within the Milky Way galaxy.

Chapter-by-chapter, Gribbin walks us through topics like What’s so special about our place in the Milky Way? What’s so special about the Sun? What’s so special about the solar system? What’s so special about the Earth? What’s so special about the Cambrian Explosion? and What’s so special about us?

Over the years, I’ve read all sorts of books that explore different facets of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but this book (a) taught me all sorts of things I didn’t know and (b) tied all sorts of things together to give me a completely different perspective.

Apart from anything else, I have long been aware that our continued presence in the universe is tenuous at best. There are all sorts of possible extinction level events that could take us out of the picture, such as a giant asteroid striking the Earth or our creating an artificial self-aware intelligence that subsequently decides that we [humans] are either a threat or simply surplus to its requirements and decides to help us exit stage left (Click Here to see my review of Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson).

The thing is that, although I think we as a race are precious and have a lot to offer, before reading Alone in the Universe I tended to be somewhat sanguine about things and to take the view that if anything did happen to wipe us out, at least there would be other intelligent species out there to carry on the good fight. But now that I have read Alone in the Universe, I’m really not so sure. It may well be that we are It, which makes it all the more important that we take better care of ourselves and the Earth (I, for one, am going to start exercising again as soon as I post this column).

The bottom line is that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It taught me lots of nuggets of knowledge and tidbits of trivia and made me look at things from a completely different angle; it’s given me a whole lot of things to think about (and to worry about); and I would heartily recommend it.

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The Drake Equation is one of those things that when you see it you say "well, that's simple" but you would never have thought about creating it yourself.
Unfortunately most of the values you "plug in" are "guesstimates", but it does provide a foundation for discussion...

i was just browsing the other day and came across the Wikipedia page on the Drake Equation. It's really just a way to add structure to guesswork about probability of life in our galaxy. Using very optimistic estimates, we see that there are 20,000 intelleigent civilizations trying to communicate right now (although the closest may still be 350 light years away). A more pragmatic estiamte tells us that there are 2 (and one of those is us!). Depressing or inspiring?

One of the things the book talks about is the possibility of creating "Von Neumann" probes that would travel at sub-light-speeds to the nearest stars. Once they arrive they would do two things: (c) send information back to us and (b) replicate themselves using materials mined from asteroids and comets with the new probes carrying on to the next nearest stars.
This is something we should be capable of doing in the not-so-distant future. Yes, it would take a while for the probes to travel to the next star, but once this started rolling it should take only 1 million years for our probes to have visited every star in our galaxy.
The thing is that if we can do it, so could other intelligent races ... so why don't we see these probes?

This comment is probably off topic a bit, but I think would be interesting to your readers.
There is a website called Symphony of Science (http://www.symphonyofscience.com/) where a talented musician by the name of John D. Boswell has set selected video snippets of popular science personnel explaining our Universe or aspects of it. What was spoken words become sung lyrics with the help of specialty software for the purpose, and these are then set to music which he composes and then sync's to the video.
It is impressive stuff whether you believe the premise of the speaker or not.
As a closet musician, I like his music.
If you like you can get all the videos as a bundle at http://melodysheep.bandcamp.com/album/symphony-of-science-bundle-v10 free, or you can donate to the site if you like.
I would be interested in any comments about the site as well.

I haven't read the book, but I appreciate your review of it.
I definitely believe we (in our form and with our experiences) are unique in the Universe, at least until such time as we colonize all these 'earth like' planets that are being found. Whatever other intelligent life is out there will be (and has to be) different and unique in their own right, unless (as Ancient Astronaut theorists believe) our race has been visited and influenced by 'people' closely similar to us thousands of years ago.
One thing for sure: We can be wiped out very quickly by the wrong set of circumstances, and that fact alone should force us to take better care of ourselves and where and how we live and if possible plan for the continuation of the human race elsewhere if we have the time.
The vast separations between the stars and galaxies may practically limit physical interaction to only light speed optical or radio communication.
How exciting or possibly frightening it would be to find out we are not unique and actual physical interaction is possible.